We recently switched to VS.NET 2003 (.NET 1.1) at work, yet we're still using third party assemblies compiled under .NET 1.0. Now, ideally, you'd want assemblies recompiled to be sure that they are running as .NET 1.1. We happen to have a source license to these controls, so that option is available to us. But what about assemblies that you can't recompile? What happens when you reference them from an application compiled under .NET 1.1? I hadn't ever considered this scenario. To me, the only thing that makes sense is that these referenced assemblies are forced to run under the same runtime as the main application, even though they were compiled under 1.0. And as it turns out, that is exactly what happens:
This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/07/grand-unification-theory.html